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GE: How Boston Won Over One of America’s Favorite Companies While Connecticut Slept

Massachusetts has consistently landed in the bottom five out of 50 states every year for the last three years in Chief Executive’s Best & Worst States for Business, as ranked by CEOs in those states. “Massachusetts is overtaxed and overregulated,” one CEO responded in 2015. Connecticut is never more than one or two steps above Massachusetts. So what did Boston do differently to win over GE that it hasn’t done before? Despite GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s public protestations, Boston, along with the state of Massachusetts, really did offer the company a better overall tax package than Connecticut was willing to do. According to the Boston Globe , city officials at the time of GE’s announcement in January said they were prepared to offer as much as $25 million in property tax relief, and the state package could be valued as high as $120 million, with the possible inclusion of grants, tax incentives, and infrastructure improvements, as well as help with real estate acquisition costs. City officials told the Boston Globe that they jumped at the chance to lure GE after Immelt wrote a memo in June to GE employees saying that the unfriendly business climate had prompted his leadership team to consider moving the headquarters out of state. The memo was a response to a decision by Connecticut officials last spring to significantly change business tax policies, to help fill a big state budget gap. Indeed, after GE’s announcement, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, told Hearst Connecticut Media that Republicans and Democrats in the state need put an end to partisan sniping over GE’s defection to Massachusetts and come together to make the state a more competitive place to do business. In his interview with the publication, Malloy pushed back against the narrative that his administration has balked […]